Science in Print

Ever since the threads of seventeenth-century natural philosophy began to coalesce into an understanding of the natural world, printed artifacts such as laboratory notebooks, research journals, college textbooks, and popular paperbacks have been instrumental to the development of what we think of today as "science." But just as the history of science involves more than recording discoveries, so too does the study of print culture extend beyond the mere cataloguing of books. In both disciplines, researchers attempt to comprehend how social structures of power, reputation, and meaning permeate both the written record and the intellectual scaffolding through which scientific debate takes places. Science in Printbrings together scholars from the fields of print culture, environmental history, science and technology studies, medical history, and library and information studies. This ambitious volume paints a rich picture of those tools and techniques of printing, publishing, and reading that shaped the ideas and practices that grew into modern science, from the days of the Royal Society of London in the late 1600s to the beginning of the modern US environmental movement in the early 1960s.

Rima D. Apple is professor emerita of interdisciplinary studies in human ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her books include Mothers and Medicine: A Social History of Infant Feeding, 1890-1950. Stephen L. Vaughn is professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and editor of the Encyclopedia of American Journalism. Gregory J. Downey is professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author of Closed Captioning: Subtitling Stenography and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television.